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Dave James
Feb 26, 2013

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After teasing us all with its
TressFX
tagline - Render. Rinse. Repeat - AMD have today revealed their (apparently painstaking) collaboration with Crystal Dynamics: the world's first real-time hair rendering technology in a playable game. Tomb Raider is the first title to get the treatment, with its bedraggled heroine's bonce featuring the most advanced follicle tech ever.

Realistic hair is, according to AMD, one of the most complex and challenging materials to accurately produce in real-time. With so many different strands and physics computations needed to model their interaction with each other, it's no wonder that we've been stuck with chunky polygon make-weight barnets in gaming. But no longer.

Cheer up, Lara, at least your hair looks nice.

TressFX uses the existing DirectCompute language to use the massively parallel capabilities of modern graphics cards, and AMD is citing the Graphics Core Next architecture as key to the ability to accurately render the hair in real-time. It's not clear yet whether the TressFX tech is going to be proprietary to AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, or whether it's going to run on any GPU with the compute capabilities necessary to handle such a large number of objects. However, there are strong suggestions it'll be an open technology: AMD have talked a lot about using the open DirectCompute language, and though their GCN architecture is particularly well-equipped to handle this stuff, they've never stated it's
the only
architecture capable.

That could be very important for the widespread use of the tech by different developers, and considering
Nvidia's Tessellation/compute-based hair tech
hasn't been really picked up since its launch alongside Fermi in 2010, you'd hope AMD would see the opportunities inherent in making their tech open for all. Plus, AMD has past form in championing non-proprietary tech, like the HD3D tech and the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) it is soon introducing to its APUs - possibly in the PlayStation 4 and NextBox - so we've got high hopes.

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